Letter from the Archive: Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” published in the June 24, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, is the kind of essay you’ll want to start, finish, and then start again. It’s about a 1991 shooting in the physics department at the University of Iowa, where Beard worked as an editor of a physics journal. But Beard doesn’t write about the shooting the way most reporters would. She tells the story in a ruminative, expansive, associative way, as if to show how all the threads of a person’s life can be drawn together and cut in a single moment.

I’ve returned to this essay many times over the years, and I’m always moved by the way it juxtaposes a tragedy on Earth with the larger world of the stars. Many of the people who died in the shooting were physicists; does the fact that they’d devoted their lives to understanding things much bigger than themselves—planets, stars, the universe—change the meaning of what happened, or help make to sense of it? Here’s how Beard describes the night outside her house:

In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

At the end of the day, the essay suggests, we might not know where our lives take place. Are we living here, at these desks, in these rooms, or are we living in the universe, which is governed by stranger laws?

The essay’s title, “The Fourth State of Matter,” refers to plasma, which many of the physicists study. (One of them “is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings.”) It’s available in its entirety in our online archive.

Photograph: NASA.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes a blog about books and ideas.